## About kramdown
kramdown (sic, not Kramdown or KramDown, just kramdown) is a *free*
GPL-licensed [Ruby](http://www.ruby-lang.org) library for parsing a
superset of Markdown. It is completely written in Ruby, supports
standard Markdown (with some minor modifications) and various
extensions that have been made popular by the [PHP Markdown Extra]
package and [Maruku].
Homepage for installation instructions and documentation:
http://kramdown.rubyforge.org
## kramdown 0.5.0 released
This release features syntax support for smart quotes in kramdown
documents and a new converter for LaTeX output. The kramdown binary has
also been enhanced to support setting any option.
The additional support for the smart quotes makes this release of
kramdown a little bit slower than the previous releases when run under
Ruby 1.8. However, a small optimization in the span parser which is not
noticable under Ruby 1.8 gives quite a performance boost under Ruby 1.9
(see the graphs on the [tests page][1]).
Also note that the internals have been restructured slightly. So if you
do more than just using the basic
Kramdown::Document.new(SOURCE, OPTIONS).to_html
{: lang="ruby"}
you may need to adapt your code.
Since the option handling has been revamped, each coderay option must
not be set separably!
## Changes
* Major changes:
- Enhanced the `kramdown` binary (it now supports setting the
available options)
- Added support for ERB templates to wrap the generated output
- Added syntax support for smart quotes
- Added a converter for LaTeX output
* Minor changes:
- Some code restructurations
- The quotation mark `"` is not converted to `&quot;` in normal text
anymore.
* Bug fixes:
- Fixed problem with multibyte encodings under Ruby 1.9
[1]: http://kramdown.rubyforge.org/tests.html